Last of the Summer Moët

by Wendy Holden

  Laura tucked gratefully into the loin of venison but all around people ignored the food whilst downing an endless and increasingly bizarre sequence of drinks. She watched Caspar worked his way steadily through espresso snakebites, moonshine daiquiris and something called a double-whammy absinthe blaster.

  As the minor trophies were handed out, the recipients attempted to outdo each other in the humble background stakes.

  ‘I think that everyone should wait tables at some point in their life.’

  ‘I had croup as a kid. I was always in the vaporiser tent.’

  Or they thanked an endless list of colleagues.

  ‘She is by far the most committed and dedicated third grip I have ever worked with.’

  ‘The director was awesome. A lighthouse of searching calm in a sea of crazy.’

  Laura was aware, at the next table, of the searching lighthouse of Savannah Bouche’s stare. She was watching Caspar with what looked like malevolent delight. Whether she recognised Laura from the interview – how long ago that seemed now – and the more recent Great Hording incidents was not clear.

  A short and animated man won, appropriately enough, Best Animated Short.

  ‘I’m gonna hug the hell out of you when the feeling re-enters my body,’ he told his colleagues, who looked alarmed.

  The Ivy for best TV programme was taken by the writer of a stately home series who said it was ‘like winning the Nobel Prize’. Laura was aghast at his immodesty. And this on the stage where Fonteyn and Nureyev had danced!

  The Best Supporting Actor category was won by a woman who had played Mrs Goebbels. ‘What was it about acting like a Nazi’s wife that appealed to you?’ asked the provocative comedian, to laughter from the audience. The actress had a tough reputation.

  Finally, the moment arrived. As everyone in the room stared at Caspar and Savannah, Laura felt under the table and squeezed Caspar’s fingers. She was alarmed to see, a second later, Caspar raise both hands to check his man-bun. His agent, meanwhile, grinned at her meaningfully.

  Up on the stage, his broad proportions haloed in the spotlight, the sardonic comedian fondled his goatee. The pop of champagne corks could be heard discreetly at the back. ‘Not yet!’ he warned, cueing a dutiful ripple of laughter.

  He cleared his throat and opened the envelope. ‘And the nominees are...’

  The room was so still you could have heard a diamond-mounted Tiffany pin drop.

  ‘Alex McGrimm, for Skaghead...’

  That was a Glasgow-set drugs drama, Laura had gathered. The table concerned had a tartan cloth and flowers arranged in the shape of hypodermic needles.

  ‘...Savannah Bouche, for Watery Grave...’

  Thunderous applause greeted this. Savannah half rose, then sank again, expression sorrowful, head bowed, hand over her heart.

  ‘...and last, Caspar Honeybun... sorry, Man-bun...’

  He paused for uproarious laughter. Caspar beamed up at him, the best of sports. Only Laura was close enough to hear him chanting, in an ominous monotone, out of the corner of his mouth, ‘And afterwards, I’m going to fucking kill you...’

  ‘...for The Caucus Imperative.’

  This was greeted with loud cheers from the Bond table, and frozen silence from the Watery Grave one, canine contingent included. The dogs were, in any case, making short work of the leftover venison. Polite applause from the rest of those present implied the audience was treading a cautious line between the two megastars.

  ‘And the winner is...’

  He ripped open the red envelope with plump white hands.

  ‘Savannah Bouche for Watery Grave!’

  ‘Waaaahhhhh!’ shrieked a triumphant Savannah, at the exact same time Caspar shouted, ‘Fuckinghellno!’ He slammed his head into the Bond place mat as Savannah, amid applause and the film music played on a soulful single cello, leapt up with practised grace and bounded up on stage where, deftly avoiding the fat comedian’s attempted embrace, she snatched his microphone with one hand, her Ivy award with the other and launched into her acceptance speech.

  ‘Oh my goodness, dreams do come true. I wanna thank all of you who believed in me and this amazing project. In particular I wanna thank everyone who drowned trying to get to Europe—’

  The fat comedian, who seemed to have been listening to something on an earpiece, now lunged forward and grabbed the microphone back off her.

  ‘There’s been a mistake,’ he said bluntly, going to the edge of the stage and staring down at where Caspar still sat, slumped forward, forehead to the place mat. ‘They gave me the wrong envelope. Bond, you’ve won best actor. Watery Grave gets the Ivy... for Best Costumes...’

  The roars, cheers and shouts of amazement drowned Savannah’s screams of fury, but had no effect whatsoever on Caspar, who seemed to have knocked himself out.

  ‘Caspar! You’ve won!’ Laura cried, shaking the tuxedoed arm, to no avail.

  A tense official announcement, in cut-glass Covent Garden tones, was coming over the tannoy. ‘The presenter was mistakenly given the wrong category envelope which, when discovered, was immediately corrected. We deeply regret that this occurred...’

  All around where Laura sat beside Caspar people were hugging each other. Some gleefully, some wiping away tears as if overcome with the sheer emotion of it all. The air was full of exclamation.

  ‘Omigod! Wasn’t that the craziest Ivys of all time?’

  How could it be? Laura wondered. It was only the first one.

  ‘We just made history, hashtag most insane moment ever, it all felt like it was on another planet...’

  Amid the excitement and the panic, Laura felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned round and looked up to see row upon row of faces; agitated, excited, alarmed. One stood out. She didn’t just recognise it. She knew it.

  ‘Harry!’ she gasped, leaping to her feet. ‘What the hell...?’

  He put a finger to his lips, pulled her towards him with the strong hand she had so often dreamt about. ‘Not now. We have to leave.’

  She stared at him, confused. She had certainly meant to leave, but it was complicated now, with Caspar in a coma.

  ‘You’ve got to come with me to Great Hording.’

  ‘Well, I am... I mean, I was...’ She looked down doubtfully at the Best Actor. Was life returning? Was that a fluttering around his eyelids?

  ‘You’ve got to come now. Lulu’s disappeared.’

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Earlier That Day

  How much longer, Kiki wondered, could she keep up the façade? Pretend that nothing had happened?

  It had been two days since the dread moment she had opened her computer to find that her worst fears were realised and the Golden Goose’s file of all the villagers and their contacts, the priceless Great Hording List, had been hacked.

  The shock had been such that she had knocked her foxglove tea right into her flaxseed breakfast mix. But there was no doubt about it. That she could actually open and read the list was proof. For well over a week it had been inaccessible thanks to the complex system of passwords imposed by Sir Philip Peaseblossom. So much, Kiki thought angrily, for the best of MI6.

  And now everyone’s personal information was in the public domain. As well as details of where all their friends and acquaintances lived. Mobile phone numbers, email addresses, credit card numbers, online passwords were all there, along with much that was infinitely more incriminating. The tsunami of unflattering stories that had immediately appeared in the media was no surprise to her, even if the rest of the village found it a mystery.

  ‘Everyone knows my husband consults an astrologer now!’ Kate Threadneedle stormed. ‘It’s made a nonsense of his financial forecasts.’

  The fact that Zeb Spaw had recently ordered How To Paint and Drawing For Beginners from his Amazon Prime account was also out in the open. No one was buying his claim that it was post-modern irony. Or, increasingly, his artworks.

  The acrimonious correspondence which Dame Hermione had be
en conducting with a reader accusing her of lifting large chunks of Black Beauty was also online for all to see. Would Great Hording’s artistic pre-eminence ever recover?

  Would Kiki? If the leak became public, it would spell curtains for her career. Let alone her hopes of becoming a rich man’s wife. Jonny would cut her off without a second thought and, as he had contacts everywhere, she’d be lucky to run a whelk stand in Blackpool.

  It was with a tight, tense feeling in her insides that she had been going about her business ever since; planning menus, briefing bar staff, checking rooms that – for the moment at any rate – no one was staying in. That was another unexploded bomb, of course. While Jonny liked to say the Golden Goose wasn’t about profit, it certainly wasn’t about loss. Jonny’s world was all about winning; if not money, then power and influence. All of which, as Kiki saw it, were leaking fast.

  And then, early this evening, the phone had rung with Lulu on the end of it. Kiki had immediately assumed that she too was complaining about the leaks and it took some time to unpick both the cross purposes and Lulu’s impenetrable idiom.

  ‘You’re saying that someone who used to work for you, a thief to put it bluntly, is in the village?’ the pub manageress decoded, eventually.

  ‘Is dangerous woman. Bad person.’

  ‘What does she look like?’

  ‘Blonde ponytail. Tall, like supermodel.’

  Kiki didn’t like the sound of this at all. There were more than enough supermodel-like women in the village as it was.

  ‘Where did you see her?’

  ‘Riding the bike down willage street. Is why she is here?’

  You tell me, Kiki wanted to say. Everything she knew about the village was known by everyone else now, after all.

  ‘I’ll look into it,’ she promised Lulu, through gritted teeth. It rankled to have to account for herself to the ghastly blonde whose advent in the village had been the start of the string of disasters.

  She had returned to the bar to find Peter Delabole taking his usual seat at the beamed and polished bar. He courteously raised his modest half of ale and said, in his modest tones, ‘Forgive me for asking, Miss Cavendish, but you seem a little distracted this evening.’

  It was all Kiki could do not to fall on his neck and tell him everything. While she prided herself on being self-sufficient, some burdens were just too big for one person to bear.

  She stopped herself, however. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, switching on her most dazzling beam and feeling her heart twist as Peter smiled his slow smile and crinkled his eyes. He really was so handsome, albeit in an understated way. And a not-at-all rich way, more was the pity. The laddered bones of Kiki’s chest rose and fell in a sigh.

  Peter nodded. ‘Well, I won’t pry. But if you ever wanted to talk, I’m always here.’ The gold rim round his vintage watch – his father’s, he’d once told her – glinted reassuringly as he extended his long, sensitive hand and sympathetically touched hers. The caress was only fleeting, but the effect was electric. Underslept and overwrought as she was, Kiki was pushed over the edge.

  ‘Oh God, Peter...’ One hand flew to her mouth, while the other grabbed his wrist.

  He was off the stool in a second. ‘My dear Miss Cavendish!’ Feeling his strong arm about her, cheek pressed to the scratchy warmth of his ice-blue Shetland V-neck, Kiki was lost. ‘I’ve been so worried...’ she began.

  She could trust him, she knew. He had, at her instigation, already fixed the pub quiz. He harboured secrets about the Golden Goose as it was. She began slowly, checking his expression for any sign that he was judging her, or disapproving. But the blue eyes held nothing but sympathy as she described the hacking of her sacred List.

  ‘And then I got a call from Lulu. She says she’s seen a thief in the village.’

  A smile flickered about the ends of Peter’s long mouth. ‘A thief? With arrows up his suit and dragging a ball and chain? That would seem to match the cartoonish perceptions of our dear local billionheiress.’

  Kiki shook her head. The pencil slid out and clattered on the floor. ‘No, someone she says used to work for her. A woman. Blonde, with a ponytail, on a bicycle.’

  ‘How very alarming. Well, we must do something about that, mustn’t we?’ This sent a warm wash of relief through Kiki. It was almost as if her problems were his problems too.

  Kiki beamed at him. ‘Do you think I should ring the police? she asked him. According to Lulu, this woman’s a criminal. She’s here to cause trouble.’

  She was surprised to see Peter’s benign features become suddenly flinty and hard. ‘I think we should take care of her within the community,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that the Great Hording way?’

  ‘But how will we recognise her?’ Kiki wondered. ‘Lulu’s the only one who knows her.’

  ‘Well, we shall have to find Lulu,’ said Peter. ‘By any means necessary.’ He stood up and cast a quick look round. The bar was empty apart from Pavel, who was polishing glasses quietly behind the bar. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, the distant crash of Hervé’s pans could be heard.

  Looking adoringly up at her champion, Kiki watched him nod his head at the handsome barman. As if at a prearranged signal, Pavel nodded back and placed his teatowel carefully on the side. He then went into the kitchen, where a conversation ensued in a foreign language that was definitely not French.

  ‘Goodness,’ said Kiki with nervous brightness. ‘I didn’t realise Hervé spoke Polish.’

  Peter’s eyes were cold and his expression set. ‘It’s not Polish. Everyone thinks it is but that’s because they’re stupid. Pavel is Russian. Hervé too.’

  Kiki gasped. ‘That explains everything!’

  ‘Everything?’ There was shock in Peter’s tone.

  ‘About the steak and kidney pie. Hervé puts vodka in it.’

  Pavel and Hervé now appeared in the bar. They did not look at Kiki.

  ‘Now,’ said Peter. ‘There’s no time to lose.’

  It was not clear to Kiki exactly who he was talking to. ‘Now what?’ she asked.

  Peter looked at her. The look was not a pleasant one. He was feeling in his pocket. Pavel and Hervé were at either side of her. They took her arms. Kiki was about to scream when Peter pulled a cotton bookbag over her head with ‘I Like To Party and by Party I Mean Read’ printed on it. With that, he bundled her out of the room.

  *

  ‘You’re joking!’ Laura exclaimed, even though it was quite obvious that Harry wasn’t. His face was set as he piloted his battered and elderly Golf through the Covent Garden traffic. The car smelt even more horrible than she remembered, as if it had spent a long time shut up in a garage. The footwell was, as ever, a sea of rubbish. That he hadn’t bothered to clean it out for Karlie either was some comfort. There hadn’t been time to ask him about that yet though. Something else was occupying all available bandwidth.

  That Harry had been all round the world on his latest mission she could believe. That it had been so secret and dangerous he had not dared to contact her she could accept. That Ellen had helped with the story she could readily imagine. But what Harry had just said was frankly ridiculous.

  ‘Great Hording has been targeted by the Russians? It makes no sense.’

  ‘It makes perfect sense,’ Harry growled, jerking to a halt to allow a group of international schoolchildren in baseball caps follow an exasperated-looking teacher over a crossing.

  ‘But why? It’s a country village. A small town by the sea. Why target that? I thought Russian hackers targeted Westminster, the NHS, the British establishment, that sort of thing.’

  Harry was swerving round a hen party now. The bride-to-be was wearing flashing devil horns and shaking a pulsating trident.

  ‘They did exactly that.’

  Laura, in the passenger seat in her bright gold suit, felt that the already surreal evening was taking an even crazier twist. In a minute she would wake up and be in her bed in Shoreditch. Or on a sunny riverbank, like Alice.

  B
ut hopefully not. Because her quick journalist’s brain had now seized the story. ‘Of course!’ she exclaimed. ‘Great Hording is a microcosm of power in Britain. You’ve got cabinet ministers, the heads of banks and the security services there, top judges, army generals, literary lions, famous artists...’

  Harry seemed more occupied with the gearstick than in Laura’s discoveries. He had clearly worked it all out already.

  ‘And by attacking Great Hording, they attacked the Establishment!’

  Night-time London was speeding by. Progress was faster now, the roads wider and emptier. ‘But what did they hope to gain?’ Laura mused, before a further flash of enlightenment illuminated what was left of the mystery. ‘Oh God, why am I even asking that? There’s a general election next week! Obviously the Russians want to disrupt as much as possible. Destabilise the nation.’

  ‘Looks like it,’ Harry concurred, his calmness and control in stark contrast to her excitement.

  Laura frowned. ‘There’s one odd thing though. They must have known the village quite well. To know who to target.’

  ‘It would seem so.’

  ‘But I never met any Russians.’

  ‘Not that you knew of.’ Harry changed gear. ‘But you certainly worked with one of them.’

  ‘Kearn?’ Laura guessed, spirits sinking.

  Harry gave a bark of laughter. ‘Hardly. He’s been a very useful contact, in fact. Bright boy, that one. No, I’m talking about someone at Society.’

  Laura turned her head so sharply towards him her hair slapped her round the face. ‘Not Clemency!’ Was it possible? She was an inveterate plotter, with proven spying abilities. And she wore a lot of red.

  ‘Karlie. Real name Karla Cormicova. Works for the Russian security services. Petty criminal, confidence tricksters. Well-versed in the latest Kremlin mind-reading techniques.’

  Laura clutched the door handle. It shifted in her hand; the passenger door never quite shut properly and could swing open without warning. ‘Petty criminal? Confidence trickster?’ Was this the person Lulu had seen in the village? And mind-reader? She remembered how Karlie always seemed to know what she was thinking.